09 February 2012

Repulsive Progressive Hypocrisy

By Glenn Greenwald

During the Bush years, Guantanamo
was the core symbol of right-wing radicalism and what was back then referred to
as the “assault on American values and the shredding of our Constitution”: so
much so then when Barack Obama ran for President, he featured these issues not
as a secondary but as a central plank in his campaign. But now that there is a
Democrat in office presiding over Guantanamo and these other polices — rather
than a big, bad, scary Republican — all of that has changed, as a new
Washington Post/ABC News poll today demonstrates:

"The sharpest edges of
President Obama’s counterterrorism policy, including the use of drone aircraft
to kill suspected terrorists abroad and keeping open the military prison at
Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, have broad public support, including from the left wing
of the Democratic Party.

A new Washington
Post-ABC News poll shows that Obama, who campaigned on a pledge to close the
brig at Guantanamo Bay and to change national security policies he criticized
as inconsistent with U.S. law and values, has little to fear politically for
failing to live up to all of those promises.

The survey shows that
70 percent of respondents approve of Obama’s decision to keep open the prison
at Guantanamo Bay. . . . The poll shows that 53 percent of self-identified
liberal Democrats — and 67 percent of moderate or conservative Democrats —
support keeping Guantanamo Bay open, even though it emerged as a symbol of the
post-Sept. 11 national security policies of George W. Bush, which many liberals
bitterly opposed."

Repulsive liberal hypocrisy
extends far beyond the issue of Guantanamo. A core plank in the Democratic
critique of the Bush/Cheney civil liberties assault was the notion that the
President could do whatever he wants, in secret and with no checks, to anyone
he accuses without trial of being a Terrorist – even including eavesdropping on
their communications or detaining them without due process. But President Obama
has not only done the same thing, but has gone much farther than mere
eavesdropping or detention: he has asserted the power even to kill citizens
without due process. As Bush’s own CIA and NSA chief Michael Hayden said this
week about the Awlaki assassination: “We needed a court order to eavesdrop on
him but we didn’t need a court order to kill him. Isn’t that something?” That
is indeed “something,” as is the fact that Bush’s mere due-process-free
eavesdropping on and detention of American citizens caused such liberal
outrage, while Obama’s due-process-free execution of them has not.

Beyond that, Obama has used
drones to kill Muslim children and innocent adults by the hundreds. He has
refused to disclose his legal arguments for why he can do this or to justify
the attacks in any way. He has even had rescuers and funeral mourners
deliberately targeted. As Hayden said: ”Right now, there isn’t a government on
the planet that agrees with our legal rationale for these operations, except
for Afghanistan and maybe Israel.” But that is all perfectly fine with most
American liberals now that their Party’s Leader is doing it:

"Fully 77 percent of liberal Democrats
endorse the use of drones, meaning that Obama is unlikely to suffer any
political consequences as a result of his policy in this election year. Support
for drone strikes against suspected terrorists stays high, dropping only
somewhat when respondents are asked specifically about targeting American
citizens living overseas, as was the case with Anwar al-Awlaki, the Yemeni
American killed in September in a drone strike in northern Yemen."

The Post‘s Greg Sargent obtained
the breakdown on these questions and wrote today:

"The number of those who approve of the
drone strikes drops nearly 20 percent when respondents are told that the
targets are American citizens. But that 65 percent is still a very big number,
given that these policies really should be controversial.

And
get this: Depressingly, Democrats approve of the drone strikes on American
citizens by 58-33, and even liberals approve of them, 55-35. Those numbers were
provided to me by the Post polling team.

It’s hard to imagine that Dems and
liberals would approve of such policies in quite these numbers if they had been
authored by George W. Bush."

Indeed: is there even a single
liberal pundit, blogger or commentator who would have defended George Bush and
Dick Cheney if they (rather than Obama) had been secretly targeting American
citizens for execution without due process, or slaughtering children, rescuers
and funeral attendees with drones, or continuing indefinite detention even a
full decade after 9/11? Please. How any of these people can even look in the
mirror, behold the oozing, limitless intellectual dishonesty, and not want to
smash what they see is truly mystifying to me.

One of the very first non-FISA
posts I ever wrote that received substantial attention was this one from
January, 2006, entitled “Do Bush Followers have an Ideology”? It examined the
way in which the Bush-supporting Right was more like an “authoritarian cult”
rather than a political movement because its adherents had no real, fixed
political beliefs; instead, I argued, their only animating “principle” was
loyalty to their leader, and they would support anything he did no matter how
at odds it was with their prior ostensible beliefs. That post was linked to and
praised by dozens and dozens of liberal blogs: can you believe what authoritarian
followers these conservatives are?, they scoffed in unison. Here was the crux
of my argument:

"Whether one is a “liberal” — or, for that
matter, a “conservative” — is now no longer a function of one’s actual
political views, but is a function purely of one’s personal loyalty to George
Bush. . . .

People who self-identify as
“conservatives” and have always been considered to be conservatives become
liberal heathens the moment they dissent, even on the most non-ideological
grounds, from a Bush decree. That’s because “conservatism” is now a term used
to describe personal loyalty to the leader (just as “liberal” is used to
describe disloyalty to that leader), and no longer refers to a set of beliefs
about government.

That “conservatism” has come to mean
“loyalty to George Bush” is particularly ironic given how truly un-conservative
the Administration is. . . . And in that regard, people like Michelle Malkin,
John Hinderaker, Jonah Goldberg and Hugh Hewitt are not conservatives. They are
authoritarian cultists. Their allegiance is not to any principles of government
but to strong authority through a single leader."

As this post demonstrates, long
before Barack Obama achieved any significance on the political scene, I
considered blind leader loyalty one of the worst toxins in our political
culture: it’s the very antithesis of what a healthy political system requires
(and what a healthy mind would produce). One of the reasons I’ve written so
much about the complete reversal of progressives on these issues (from
pretending to be horrified by them when done under Bush to tolerating them or
even supporting them when done by Obama) is precisely because it’s so
remarkable to see these authoritarian follower traits manifest so vibrantly in
the very same political movement — sophisticated, independent-minded,
reality-based progressives — that believes it is above that, and that only
primitive conservatives are plagued by such follower-mindlessness.

The Democratic Party owes a
sincere apology to George Bush, Dick Cheney and company for enthusiastically
embracing many of the very Terrorism policies which caused them to hurl such
vehement invective at the GOP for all those years. And progressives who support
the views of the majority as expressed by this poll should never be listened to
again the next time they want to pretend to oppose civilian slaughter and civil
liberties assaults when perpetrated by the next Republican President (it should
be noted that roughly 35% of liberals, a non-trivial amount, say they oppose
these Obama policies).

One final point: I’ve often made
the case that one of the most consequential aspects of the Obama legacy is that
he has transformed what was once known as “right-wing shredding of the
Constitution” into bipartisan consensus, and this is exactly what I mean. When
one of the two major parties supports a certain policy and the other party
pretends to oppose it — as happened with these radical War on Terror policies
during the Bush years — then public opinion is divisive on the question,
sharply split. But once the policy becomes the hallmark of both political
parties, then public opinion becomes robust in support of it. That’s because
people assume that if both political parties support a certain policy that it
must be wise, and because policies that enjoy the status of bipartisan
consensus are removed from the realm of mainstream challenge. That’s what
Barack Obama has done to these Bush/Cheney policies: he has, as Jack Goldsmith
predicted he would back in 2009, shielded and entrenched them as standard U.S.
policy for at least a generation, and (by leading his supporters to embrace
these policies as their own) has done so with far more success than any GOP
President ever could have dreamed of achieving.

UPDATE: The Advocacy Center for
Equality and Democracy documents how much public opinion has changed on these
issues under (and as a result of) the Obama presidency: “under the leadership
of a President who campaigned with the promise to close the facility, . . .
support for the detention center may be at its highest level ever.”

UPDATE II [Thurs.]: Here is what
Thomas Paine, in The Age of Reason, had to say about all of this:

"[I]t is necessary to the
happiness of man, that he be mentally faithful to himself. Infidelity does not
consist in believing, or in disbelieving; it consists in professing to believe
what he does not believe.

It is impossible to calculate the
moral mischief, if I may so express it, that mental lying has produced in
society. When a man has so far corrupted and prostituted the chastity of his
mind, as to subscribe his professional belief to things he does not believe, he
has prepared himself for the commission of every other crime."

As is true for so many things,
Paine grasped the crux of the matter and expressed it as well as it can be
expressed.

Sophie: You almost have to wonder if he is more
repulsed by the hypocritical Left for being hypocrites, i.e., themselves, or
himself for falling for their faux piety and plaintive wails.

“What I think I’d make clear is that I believe selling our energy products to Asia is in the country’s national interest.

It
is in our interests for all kinds of reasons, that we diversify our
exports, particularly our energy exports. It’s one thing in terms of
whether Canadians, you know, want jobs, to what degree Canadians want
environmental protection. These are all valid questions.

But just
because certain people in the United States would like to see Canada be
one giant national park for the northern half of North America, I don’t
think that’s part of what our review process is all about. Our process
is there to determine what the needs and desires of Canadians are.

And I think, ultimately, because it’s Canadian jobs that are at stake,
that Canadians have to be the ones who make the decisions.

I
think what’s happened around the Keystone is a wakeup call, the degree
to which we are dependent or possibly held hostage to decisions in the
United States, and especially decisions that may be made for very bad
political reasons."

- Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, 17 January 2012

"Canada has the resources, technological sophistication, and
geo-strategic positioning to complement China's economic growth
strategy. And China's growth, in turn, complements our determination to
diversify our export markets. The cumulative impact of these accords
truly takes Canada-China relations to a new level. We expect to see similar success stories in Canadian energy exports to China, once infrastructure is in place."- Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, 9 February 2012

People inside the Occupy movement — including one of the leaders of
the Occupy Newark encampment — claim that Occupy Wall Street is racist
against people of color. These new accusations of racism are based on
people’s personal experiences with the increasingly secretive and
“fascist” Occupy Wall Street leadership and the actions of OWS
participants.

Imagine the amount of press the following story would get if it
occurred at a Tea Party event.

“If you ever want to see the biggest
bunch of a**holes in the world, it’s Occupy Wall Street,” an
unidentified man told me.

We were in the atrium of 60 Wall Street, a
location that Occupy Wall Street uses for meetings especially on
evenings such as this past Friday when the weather outside was rainy and
cold. The gentleman speaking to me was clearly upset, in his late 30s,
neatly dressed and black. He eyed the tables of white Occupiers chowing
down nearby. He said:

“I brought plates. I brought plates free for
everyone to eat on and what do they do? They asked me if I’d washed my
hands. That’s how they treat us here.”

This man’s complaints about his own personal experience of antiblack
racism at Occupy Wall Street were echoed by every black person I spoke
to this past week in New York. Some people did not want to go on record,
possibly fearing reprisals from people at Occupy Wall Street, but
others freely admitted in video interviews that BigGovernment.com and
Breitbart.TV will be releasing this week that they think the Occupy Wall
Street movement is “clearly” and “absolutely” racist against people of
color based on their own personal experience.

Significantly, these complaints of racism are coming not from outside
critics, but from supporters and members of the Occupy movement. As this
interview clip with Occupy Newark leader Eric Richardson shows, he’s an
advocate for the supposed ideals of the Occupy movement, but says he’s
experienced racism from both the leadership and the rank-and-file
members of the Occupy movement.

This personal experience of racism at Occupy Wall Street provides a
sharp contrast with the Tea Party movement that has been accused of
racism — and specifically antiblack racism — constantly over the past
several years. I recently did an appearance on the David Webb show on
Sirius XM satellite radio and I asked Webb point blank if he’d
experienced any racism personally in the Tea Party. His answer was an
immediate unhesitating “no”. Webb said the racism he’s experienced due
to his association with the Tea Party has consisted being called “Uncle
Tom” and worse by liberals.

Later this week, we’ll be airing more clips on racism at Occupy Wall
Street and also discussing exactly why this racism is occurring.